5 Ways to Encourage Subscriber Engagement

Did you know? On average, consumers are only interested enough to open around a quarter of the email offers they receive – 24% for those received via work email and 26% for those received via personal email!

This means that unless you’re already engaging your subscribers on a deeper level, almost 75% of your marketing communications are ending up in the trash folder, the spam folder or at the bottom of the inbox and your customer’s minds.

That’s like an email marketer’s personal horror story! Unfortunately, these statistics are true… but it isn’t all bad news.

According to an independant study by Adobe, email marketers are simply failing to address the ever increasing population of people addicted to email – some even checking their email before getting out of bed every morning.

So how do you beat the odds and cash out at the email marketing lotto? Here’s 4 ways to trump subscriber engagement and solve modern problems readers are finding in their inboxes.

“I hate it when my inbox is flooded with the same, irrelevant message.”

This is such an old gripe, it’s probably referenced on Married with Children.

According to the study, people want to see fewer emails (35%), less repetition of the same messages (34%), and more personalization according to their needs and location (13%).

Often email marketers will run their email marketing lists to the point of exhaustion, sending the same message again and again. The key here is to focus on what your email reports are telling you.

Check the Open Rate

If your open rate is failing you may want to look at the content of your subject line and your email itself.

67% of the respondents also said they would be more likely to open a marketing email if the subject line made it clear there was an offer or voucher – so putting in a clear offer or incentive for people to open your email is the first step towards boosting that open rate!

If you’re still sending the same offer with similar content, eventually you’ll start sounding like a broken record and all your emails will go unopened.

Check the Click-Through Rate

If your open rate is doing just fine but you’re still not seeing those conversions, you can usually expect a low click-through rate.

If you expect to boost your click-through rate, take a look at how you’re presenting your call to action.

Make sure your email contains what your subject line refers to, and that you’re not ‘tricking’ recipients into opening your email. The call to action itself should be bold, clear and easy to find. Always ask yourself what action your email wants your reader to take and how quickly and easily your reader can perform the action.

For example, if you want your reader to go to a landing page, include two different call to actions separate from the regular copy (usually in the beginning and near the end) of your email so that subscribers know what you want them to do.

Try Marketing Automation

Of course, you could try marketing automation. This new platform identifies and sends your marketing communications to subscribers exactly when it’s relevant to them, and personalizes each and every email based on their previous interactions.

Marketing automation is especially effective for digital agencies, with SharpSpring even building their entire platform around serving such online businesses.

Optimize for Mobile

There are few things worse to do on your mobile than having to scroll in 7 directions to read an email trying to sell you something. However, it seems that many email marketers disregard this simple step… and end up isolating a big chunk of their subscriber base!

Respondents said that they were put off by having to scroll too much to read an entire email (28%), by the layout not being optimized for mobile (21%), and by having to wait for images to load (21%).

With respondents regularly checking email on desktops/ laptops (80%), smartphones (78%) and tablets (42%), marketers should make sure content is optimized for any platform and can be read on any device.

Email newsletters created from the SharpSpring Mail + email editor and email templates are automatically optimized for mobile with responsive design. This means that the content of the message is intelligently compressed for viewings on tablets, phones and desktops alike!

Know Who You’re Talking To

According to the study, the 18-34 year old demographic are the most likely to be influenced by mentions of vouchers or offers in the subject with over 75% being enticed by such offers.

Obviously, calibrating for your specific demographic is important – you won’t need to worry too much about teenagers and young adults if you’re selling zimmerframes and wheelchairs, but the point remains the same.

Structure your email content, subject line and even the way you present your product around what you demographic identifies with and what they find important or interesting. For example, talking about the Kardashians won’t go down well with an older demographic of men compared to a teenage demographic wrapped up with watching reality TV!

Email marketers should also keep in mind that many potential customers may not celebrate certain holidays around the year such as Christmas and Easter. However, this opens up possibilities for marketing to other holidays, and savvy marketers can use segmentation to target each market at the right time.

Start the Engagement

There are a myriad of ways you can increase engagement that have nothing to do with changing your email content marketing tactics – from spam prevention to deliverability.

Do you have any other ways to prevent your emails falling out of favour? Let us know by contacting us, or try a free demo and test it out for yourself!

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Author: maryka.burger

Maryka has worked across multiple industries ranging from hard news journalism to digital tech companies and advertising. She is an expert at building online presence, and offers a wealth of knowledge on digital marketing, social media and automation trends to agencies and digital start-ups.